When death is unreal, violence also becomes unreal, and human life has no value in and of itself.

~ Vine DeLoria Jr.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

~ James Baldwin, Letter from a Region in My Mind

This is a place to share dreams, visions of an “after-life”, visitation experiences, and near-death-experiences that underscore our relationship to our beloved dead, expand our culturally normative notions of death as failure or defeat.

Existential anxiety and death denial are much larger components of our cultural pathologies - including climate breakdown, all the xenophobias and -isms, genocide, and the various manifestations of supremacy - than most people care to think about.

Yet many people have unfolding, complex and evolving relationships with their beloved dead and ancestral lineage that they hold closely, if privately, as a powerful source of guidance and comfort.

You are welcome to share such experiences with this archive and they will be anonymized unless you request attribution.

You can follow along at the Bluesky dream collection account dreamsofourdead.bsky.social

The desire that life continue is larger than we are, and when our actions are guided by this desire, we can imagine around us the cheering of all those sharing our aims: the ancestors, the future beings, the natural world itself. When we’re feeling alone, discouraged, or desperate, we can turn to any of these for support.

~Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy